java.awt.image
Class VolatileImage

VolatileImage is an image which can lose its
contents at any time due to circumstances beyond the control of the
application (e.g., situations caused by the operating system or by
other applications). Because of the potential for hardware acceleration,
a VolatileImage object can have significant performance benefits on
some platforms.

The drawing surface of an image (the memory where the image contents
actually reside) can be lost or invalidated, causing the contents of that
memory to go away. The drawing surface thus needs to be restored
or recreated and the contents of that surface need to be
re-rendered. VolatileImage provides an interface for
allowing the user to detect these problems and fix them
when they occur.

When a VolatileImage object is created, limited system resources
such as video memory (VRAM) may be allocated in order to support
the image.
When a VolatileImage object is no longer used, it may be
garbage-collected and those system resources will be returned,
but this process does not happen at guaranteed times.
Applications that create many VolatileImage objects (for example,
a resizing window may force recreation of its back buffer as the
size changes) may run out of optimal system resources for new
VolatileImage objects simply because the old objects have not
yet been removed from the system.
(New VolatileImage objects may still be created, but they
may not perform as well as those created in accelerated
memory).
The flush method may be called at any time to proactively release
the resources used by a VolatileImage so that it does not prevent
subsequent VolatileImage objects from being accelerated.
In this way, applications can have more control over the state
of the resources taken up by obsolete VolatileImage objects.

Note that this class subclasses from the Image class, which
includes methods that take an ImageObserver parameter for
asynchronous notifications as information is received from
a potential ImageProducer. Since this VolatileImage
is not loaded from an asynchronous source, the various methods that take
an ImageObserver parameter will behave as if the data has
already been obtained from the ImageProducer.
Specifically, this means that the return values from such methods
will never indicate that the information is not yet available and
the ImageObserver used in such methods will never
need to be recorded for an asynchronous callback notification.

Since:

1.4

Field Summary

static int

IMAGE_INCOMPATIBLE
Validated image is incompatible with supplied
GraphicsConfiguration object and should be
re-created as appropriate.

IMAGE_RESTORED

IMAGE_INCOMPATIBLE

public static final int IMAGE_INCOMPATIBLE

Validated image is incompatible with supplied
GraphicsConfiguration object and should be
re-created as appropriate. Usage of the image as-is
after receiving this return code from validate
is undefined.

VolatileImage

getSnapshot

Returns a static snapshot image of this object. The
BufferedImage returned is only current with
the VolatileImage at the time of the request
and will not be updated with any future changes to the
VolatileImage.

getHeight

getSource

This returns an ImageProducer for this VolatileImage.
Note that the VolatileImage object is optimized for
rendering operations and blitting to the screen or other
VolatileImage objects, as opposed to reading back the
pixels of the image. Therefore, operations such as
getSource may not perform as fast as
operations that do not rely on reading the pixels.
Note also that the pixel values read from the image are current
with those in the image only at the time that they are
retrieved. This method takes a snapshot
of the image at the time the request is made and the
ImageProducer object returned works with
that static snapshot image, not the original VolatileImage.
Calling getSource()
is equivalent to calling getSnapshot().getSource().

validate

Attempts to restore the drawing surface of the image if the surface
had been lost since the last validate call. Also
validates this image against the given GraphicsConfiguration
parameter to see whether operations from this image to the
GraphicsConfiguration are compatible. An example of an
incompatible combination might be a situation where a VolatileImage
object was created on one graphics device and then was used
to render to a different graphics device. Since VolatileImage
objects tend to be very device-specific, this operation might
not work as intended, so the return code from this validate
call would note that incompatibility. A null or incorrect
value for gc may cause incorrect values to be returned from
validate and may cause later problems with rendering.

Parameters:

gc - a GraphicsConfiguration object for this
image to be validated against. A null gc implies that the
validate method should skip the compatibility test.

Returns:

IMAGE_OK if the image did not need validationIMAGE_RESTORED if the image needed restoration.
Restoration implies that the contents of the image may have
been affected and the image may need to be re-rendered.IMAGE_INCOMPATIBLE if the image is incompatible
with the GraphicsConfiguration object passed
into the validate method. Incompatibility
implies that the image may need to be recreated with a
new Component or
GraphicsConfiguration in order to get an image
that can be used successfully with this
GraphicsConfiguration.
An incompatible image is not checked for whether restoration
was necessary, so the state of the image is unchanged
after a return value of IMAGE_INCOMPATIBLE
and this return value implies nothing about whether the
image needs to be restored.

contentsLost

public abstract boolean contentsLost()

Returns true if rendering data was lost since last
validate call. This method should be called by the
application at the end of any series of rendering operations to
or from the image to see whether
the image needs to be validated and the rendering redone.

Returns:

true if the drawing surface needs to be restored;
false otherwise.

getCapabilities

Returns an ImageCapabilities object which can be
inquired as to the specific capabilities of this
VolatileImage. This would allow programmers to find
out more runtime information on the specific VolatileImage
object that they have created. For example, the user
might create a VolatileImage but the system may have
no video memory left for creating an image of that
size, so although the object is a VolatileImage, it is
not as accelerated as other VolatileImage objects on
this platform might be. The user might want that
information to find other solutions to their problem.

Returns:

an ImageCapabilities object that contains
the capabilities of this VolatileImage.

Since:

1.4

getTransparency

public int getTransparency()

Returns the transparency. Returns either OPAQUE, BITMASK,
or TRANSLUCENT.